NEW HAVEN, Conn. (CBS Connecticut/AP) — An expert told CBS News that environmental shifts caused by climate change could lead to coastal flooding the likes of which was seen during Superstorm Sandy.

“Sea levels were higher when Sandy hit then they were say 100 years ago,” Dr. Radley Horton, a climate scientist at Columbia University and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said. “As a result of that, the damage, the water piling up, was higher than it would’ve been before we had that sea level rise.”

Horton also mentioned the melting of the polar ice caps and rising ocean temperatures as causes for concern.

“We’ve got about 40 percent more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than we did at the start of the Industrial Revolution,” he noted. “That’s almost entirely due to human activities, the burning of fossil fuels, land use changes, cutting of forests.”

Horton added, “As a result, we’ve got more of these heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. Some of that heat warms the atmosphere, some of it goes down into the ocean, and a warming liquid expands. Additionally, some of that ice that was trapped on land before is starting to melt, making its way into the water where it can cause sea level rise.”

The catastrophic effects of the storm are still being felt. A year after Superstorm Sandy drove Deborah Dinan from her Milford home, she lives above a loud bar and is often reduced to tears as she struggles to return to her flood ravaged home.